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Brett Evans and Christopher Shipman

Collaborative Poem

ISBN: 978-1-944884-36-9
186 Pages: $16.00 (February 2018)

A book of poetry. A poet. Well, right off the bat, we’ll see you your poet and raise you two stooges. When most Americans think of a poet, and without invoking the Barry Manilow rule, they might picture a lone malcontent, tapping on restored Underwood, inky possum-snout dowsing a notebook. But the truth is that most poets are interesting people to meet and talk to. Even if a certain reading wasn’t quite your jam, you can have a great conversation with The Poet later at the bar, or at the store or in the park.

This book continues a conversation between Brett Evans and Chris Shipman that was begun at a shared reading in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and (unbeknownst at the time) prequeled by the fact that both poets shared a common teacher, Roger Kamenetz, who taught them separately across a 25-year span. It’s a book about the process of writing and the process of life. Being that the two stooge bards are writing in New Orleans, they must needs throw things at you, the reader. We hope to capture the immediacy of an intimate conversation spreading beyond ourselves. It’s about city living in these demesnes, this American circumstance, this allover sinking into the Ocean. It’s shallow and deep, silly-antic and meaningful, with (we dearly hope) enough rough bling in the beadwork to make it also pretty and fun. Please take it in and share with us — as bitters lash the glass or the trees bend to the breeze — what we need to do to be better poets and better human beings.

Gamut, consider yourself run: Keats moves from grief to hope, horror to hilarity, subtle subversion to guerrilla mischief, without ever losing Evans’ and Shipman’s trademark collaborative cool. How do they make being utterly original look not only Easy but Big? Under their guidance, insurgency thrives, frustration is nothing more than raw material, and the unobserved life is not worth living. These poems are salve for a demoralized world, and they belong to the canon the way art belongs to life. Anything else is ersatz.

—Amber Qureshi, Gadfly

“Which are by Evans and which by Shipman” are questions for accountants. Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare’s plays? Is a Christ shroud necessary to divine the Jesus? Like taint tag and rainy foolscape, fuck hot divorced and end-times tangy, Shivans and Evman juxtapose into a third eye on the prize.

—Todd Schrenck

EvansShipman have merged to form a durable romantic monster with one big clear voice, scarifying at times as poetic monsters should be, but also amiable amidst the ruins of New Orleans. In this “Land of the Living” ouija is a verb and cockroaches with fuzzball sidecars avert an open death sentence by pure mercy of a vibrant line. Among “the monsters/ who pass for boring citizens” ChrisBrett’s monster book of wit & wisdom rolls down Almonaster Boulevard barely averting a lucrative accident with Morris Bart’s Bag of Donuts amid all the “fucking folly of man.” The unreal surrealism of New Orleans has found its double mouth and quadruple ear so let’s dance “losing dog” while we still all have four legs.